Should You Splice Your Business?

The alternative to offering your clients everything all at once is breaking your business up, as I've recently done. For example, if you are selling private yoga to brides, you need one website/business/brand for that. If you are offering mentoring and information to creative entrepreneurs, you need a separate website/business/brand for that. If you are selling calligraphy, you need yet a third site/business/brand for that.

Why? Without even telling you what those three businesses have to offer individually, you already have three very different choices- (1) yoga to brides, (2) business coaching to creatives and (3) calligraphy. Maybe there are three people out there who would want all of those services, but by branding each business individually, you reach many more people. For example, by branding yourself as a private yoga teacher for brides, you can potentially reach hundreds of people in your area quickly and easily.

Meanwhile, if you choose to have all of these other services on your yoga site as well, they are competing for your potential client's attention. What could have been a potential client will never become a client. They will get too confused and leave your website.

To figure out how to splice your business, try these three things:

(1) Gain an outside perspective.

For this to work, you need some kind of objective opinion of your website, brand or business. You may be able to do this yourself, but even better is if you can find a fellow creative to bounce ideas off of. Have her look at your website and see if she can even find one service you are offering. While it may be clear to you, it is not always clear to others. Have her do this for every iteration until you can really hone down the ONE service you're offering (note- that one service is not the same as one sales package.) For example, prior to splicing my biz, Carte Blanche offered yoga privates, wellness coaching AND business mentoring. Whew. How was I going to get anyone's attention with all that noise going on? Now, Carte Blanche only offers one service- business mentoring, which I can break down further into more specific things that the same client would want, i.e. legal consulting, brand advising, blog coaching, etc.

(2) Splicing doesn't mean you can't do it all.

One service doesn't mean you forget wedding photography and only shoot newborns. It means you only have all your photography on one website-- i.e. not photography and event planning, photography and florals or photography and graphic design. Each of these will be more effective if they are on different sites with different social accounts. No one said it would be easy. But it can be done.

(3) Splicing means you get to go deeper.

As an added bonus to splicing your business interests up like this, you can break down and go into even more detail about your offerings than you would be able to if all your services were on one site. I.e., if you have a floral site and an event planning business and they are on different websites, you can go into much more detail about what your floral service entails without overwhelming your clients. Your clients are now looking at three packages pertaining to florals instead of three packages of florals, three packages of wedding event planning and three packages of photography.